Nimue Brown's Blog, page 437

Earning it

We hear a lot from the government about workers and shirkers, the hard working who deserve their money and the scroungers who deserve nothing. By this we are to understand that wealth itself is evidence of effort while poverty indicates laziness. That would be a very convenient explanation, skipping over how much wealth is earned and how much inherited. Wealth buys opportunity, education and connections, but if you acknowledge that, you have to recognise that massive earning differences have nothing to do with worth.

Now, if someone is out there saving lives, then it would be hard to over value their worth. Firemen would be a fine case in point. Would any of us argue with massive pay rises and bonuses for firemen, who risk their lives on a regular basis to save the lives and property of others? Firemen are heroes. We will never be able to thank them enough for what they do. But, compare that to bankers who take other people’s money and effectively gamble with it, and seem to get paid whether they make money for their bank, are mediocre or actually bankrupt a country. I’d love to know how that works. The guy at Barkleys Bank wisely declined his obscene bonus this week, perhaps recognising it might not be politic to take what he clearly hadn’t earned.

We have a system based on ideas of growth, market development, investment and whatnot. Now, skipping over the issue of infinite growth with finite resources…. I learn from the Guardian that the economic boom of the noughties was an illusion. Businesses were not investing or growing, and most of the money came from borrowing against inflated house prices. FTSE top 100 companies grew by 2.6 % on average per year while executive bonuses went up by 26 % a year, on average. My ten year old can do the maths. It’s insane. If a person gets paid way beyond what they earn, or generate for their company, they have not earned it. A bonus based on actual profits, actual development would make some kind of sense, but this doesn’t. It’s all about those in high places having the power to set their own pay scales and enough friends also in power to back them up. If you can’t show your company is thriving, you haven’t earned a bonus, and the only bonus you could earn would be in line with company profit. Anything else is TAKEN, not earned.

Let’s backtrack to those thought forms about hard work and earning your money. No company could survive without the people who do the work. The makers and builders, the ones on the shop floor, the ones talking to customers. These are the people at the bottom end of the pay scale, least valued by the company and they aren’t paid bonuses, in the normal scheme of things. Why assume if a company thrives that it is only due to the efforts of the management?

What I’d like is legislation that requires bonuses and pay rises to be linked directly to profitability in a meaningful way. (Not think of a multiplier and use that). I think there should also be a requirement that bonuses be paid out to every employee, not to managers alone, in situations of profit and success, and that people who are discernibly doing a mediocre job, or failing, should not get pay rises. Workers don’t get pay rises if their annual review doesn’t see them as being valuable. Why should bosses be different?

The irony here, is that this would be a system to drive genuine growth and investment. Full on capitalism. The people who claim to be capitalists evidently aren’t – rewarding failure and not investing to grow do not a capitalist system make. It’s not about the market, it’s simply a leech culture. And here’s me, anarchic and anti-capitalist with a vision that, although it alarms me to say it, is really speaking more innately capitalist in principle than what the capitalists are doing.

Yes Mr Cameron, we do have a culture where there are hard working people, and scroungers. Generally speaking, the scroungers are doing really well at bleeding the economy dry for their own benefit, while the hard workers are not anything like as well paid as they deserve to be. This is because we have a system that rewards power, not effort, or achievement. Just power. But that’s probably not worrying you, given that you are quite definitively In Power. However, as every leech knows, if you bleed a thing dry, you starve. A little enlightened self interest might not go amiss

Good art and entertaining

“The list of 55 titles, drawn from 98 official nominations, is presented annually at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. The books, recommended for those ages 12-18, meet the criteria of both good quality literature and appealing reading for teens.”

That quote comes from http://www.ala.org/yalsa/booklists/ggnt/2013 and the Young Adult Library Services Association selection of Great Graphic novels 2013. There must have been thousands of potential candidates.

All on its own, that quote would make me very happy. The recognition that good quality creativity that is also accessible and entertaining, should be available, is vital. Dull if worthy books do not get readers excited. Vacuous books… well, I think we’ve established what I think about throw away content. It makes me grumpy. More time spent shouting out the good stuff, the stuff that has content and is also fun and enjoyable, is time well spent, so there’s a list of 55 things that it is well worth waving at teen readers, and people who like teen reads. Do give it a look if you like graphic novels.

We found out about this yesterday, and we found out because we made the list. Hopeless Maine only came out last November, we never expected anything like this kind of attention. It’s startling, and we feel profoundly honoured. We’re also delighted to see Rust and Cowboy – other titles from Archaia – also on that list. Archaia put out unusual books, they aren’t driven by market trends or assumptions about what is ‘in’ this year. They take risks – they took us – and those risks are resulting in kudos and sales. There are enough people out there who want something new and surprising after all. It feels like a huge victory. The comics industry is dominated by DC and Marvel, people in what looks to me like fetish gear, thumping each other. But evidently there is room for other stuff too, and that makes me happy. Diversity is a good thing.

A matter of weeks ago I had run out of hope. The whole business seemed impossible, demoralising, a bit… hopeless. To be recognised as both good art and entertaining is so important to me. I want to do both, be both. I don’t want to write the kind of stuff only a handful of academics could ever be interested in, and at the same time, I don’t want to write the kind of stuff I don’t enjoy reading. I was so close to quitting, because I kept feeling I just couldn’t do it on my terms. 5000 librarians and library workers apparently think otherwise. That’s huge.

I’m in a process of doing some serious rethinking about how, and why, I want to work. I’d reached some decisions that are, in many ways, reinforced by what happened yesterday. I’m not interested in ‘being a professional writer’ I need to do work that is meaningful to me. If I can do that with the writing, excellent. If not, then tutoring, workshops, editing and whatever conventional stuff I can find will be more in the mix. My terms, or not at all. Which leaves me asking the interesting question of what ‘on my terms’ means to me these days. In all the crap and fear and stress, I lost my way. Figuring out what I want is a big part of what I need in place to move forwards. I have some ideas –more on that soon. In the meantime, I just feel a bit vindicated, which was timely, and a lot encouraged, which is helpful.

Rebellious Roots

I spent last night listening to the BBC radio 2 Folk awards. On the whole radio2 tends towards the shiny end of folk, and I tend towards the raw and dirty end, but they had Billy Bragg on and Treacherous Orchestra, so that was fine. Folk is where I come from, it’s home, ancestry, community, more so than Druidry because folk has been there my whole life. I’ve seen a fight, in my lifetime to keep the folk traditions alive. Back in the 80s, the prospect wasn’t good, with aging and dwindling clubs, but, there’s a tremendous resurgence going on and a lot of brilliant young people coming through.

At the Druid Network convention back in November, Paul Mitchell pointed out that our folk traditions are as much a part of our heritage as Stonehenge. More so, because folk has the potential to belong to everyone, and apparently Stonehenge doesn’t, and we can’t all get there and it would be bloody crowded if we did. Folk is where you are, there’s plenty around. It’s your traditions, your heritage, be that farming or industry, or protest or something else.

I have some sense of who my people were, what they did and the land they come from. Not everyone has that. One of the things the folk tradition does is gives you a huge pool of possible ancestry to pick from. Of course you had your share of poachers, soldiers, peasants, and poets – we all do. Not everyone engages with folk, too much beard, woolly jumper and finger in ear… except most of it isn’t like that, and never was. Folk can be sexy, angry, militant, ironic, dangerous… and also loud, or more like classical, or all kinds of things. Still, I’m not going to lure everyone in.

I was listening to Billy Bragg talking about how much now is like life under Margaret Thatcher, and about how it keeps coming round and we keep having to fight the same fights. The protest songs serve in part to connect you to all the people who had to do it before, to make it less lonely, help see the point, keep your courage up. We all have these fights, and in sharing them, they become easier. Workers protest songs from a hundred years ago and more are very relevant. We’ve rioted before over impossible rents, and lack of food, and shitty systems and we’ll do so again.

It helps to know this. How many people don’t know? How many people live in the small awareness of a few generations, overwhelmed by what the system is doing to them and unable to imagine that you could fight back, much less that it would work. How many people don’t know about Ned Ludd and the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Peterloo massacre, the peasants revolt, chartism, levellers, diggers, and all the other brave attempts to put things right. Each round of fighting takes us a little bit further forward. Without that knowledge, without the history of dissent, revolt, non-cooperation, and uprising, it’s easy to believe that you can’t do anything.

What does that give you? A whole new kind of feudalism, in which the peasants are held in place not by laws, but by our own lack of knowledge and disbelief. That’s the developed world for you, all too often. Bread, circuses and being dictated to by our lords and masters.

Show of Hands, in their song ‘Roots’ have this line – “Without our stories and our songs, how will we know where we came from?” We don’t. We have no idea, and that makes it very hard to figure out where we might be going or how to even own that process a bit.

The season of rebirth

There have been springs when I knew I wasn’t feeling it, so much of my life innately wintery that emotionally I couldn’t engage with the return of light and life. Emotional winters are a lot easier when the rest of nature reaffirms them, but once all the nest building and sap rising gets going, it can be hard not feeling like a part of that. This winter has been deep and dark for me. I’ve been really bodily ill, I’ve gone through yet another round of awful depression, I’ve had a real intellectual crisis around my work, and some kind of emotional meltdown to boot.

The sun is out today, the snowdrops are up, and Imbolc approaches. The time of seasonal rebirth is upon us. This year I’m not feeling a barrier between myself and the season. I can go with it. I’ve had some profound revelations about the changes I need to make in my work. Opportunities have opened up, and my body is healing. I have a long legacy of fear and distress to deal with and a pressing need to rediscover myself and figure out who I am. That’s all a part of the rebirthing process, some of it may hurt, but, so be it.

I’m aware of how much my upheavals and dramas impact on the people around me, how they can be interpreted and understood. I’ve been told that, having found the person I claim as my soul mate, I ought to be able to get on with living happily ever after. I think there are times when Tom feels he ought to be able to magically fix everything for me. Of course that’s rubbish, and the love of other people is never going to save anyone. Support, comfort, friendship, patience and encouragement are incredibly valuable, but you cannot forcibly love someone out of depression or personal crisis. You can just keep holding them and reminding them how to keep going. Rebirth is not the same as birth – no one else can do it for you, or to you.

That said love has always been an essential part of life for me. Love where what you give is returned, is a healing and inspiring experience. Love that seems one sided, that becomes an excuse to cause pain, love that is all about demand, and ownership, and control, is only love in name, and what it does, day after day is to make it harder to give and to care. I’m starting to recognise how shut down I’ve become, how unwilling to share my heart. It’s not just a fear of rejection, it’s a fear that I am somehow an affront to other people. That’s my history speaking. I’ve been told how destructive and hurtful my love can be, but I don’t have to believe that any more.

The sap is rising, and by slow degrees I can feel my heart opening up again. Tragic news stories make me want to cry. But that’s okay, and perhaps as it should be. Depression is a non-feeling state, a defensive retreat from painful excess. I don’t want to be there anymore. I do want to care, and feel, and open my heart and give more freely of myself. I know that birth is a messy, visceral, dangerous and painful sort of process. Without birth, you don’t get life. Time to come out of the darkness and learn how to love again. How to love life, and people and places. Also, how to love myself, which has always been beyond me. That needs to change.

I’ll end with some lovely words from a February song by Jehanne Meta

I’ll not expect this year to bring

A fortune then, or anything

But love, and just the chance to sing

All these new songs in my pocket.

I’m working on the new songs, too.

The good side of pop culture

For balance, I need to talk about the good things and what I love, having griped a lot in Why I don’t like bookshops about all the lame TV rip off celebrity rubbish. There are many aspects of popular culture that I do like, but it tends to be a process of picking through to find the good stuff.

In essence, pop culture is of the people for the people, and is classed as ‘low brow’ by the more ‘up market’. Well, I’ve read literature and listened to classical music. Shakespeare is full of sex and death. Much of the ‘up market’ end is wilfully obscure though, self important and mind numbingly dull. There’s good stuff there too, but plenty of it I can live without.

Graphic novels, having evolved out of that most lowly of forms, the comic, are considered more pop culture than not. Yet there’s an incredible array of art styles and storytelling out there once you get past Batman and his friends. Assuming you want to. Some people like that sort of thing and even the most clichéd comic is capable of moments of innovation and vision. I listen to the chart show on Radio 1 most weeks, to see what’s out there, missing the top ten so that I can catch Genevieve Tudor’s folk program. A lot of popular music is, and always has been so bland that you can forget it even while you’re actually listening to it. Music written to sell to a market, music by people who want to be famous, music written by committee to tick as many commercial boxes as possible. Blandsville. But now and then there’s someone who has something to say, or who loves what they do, someone passionate about their thing, or political, or funny. So I’ll confess to liking Rizzlekicks and that Dizzy Rascal’s Filthy Stinking Bass makes me smile, but if I never heard Rhianna again, I’d be entirely happy about that.

I come from a folk background, there’s something from that tradition hardwired into who I am. Plenty of folk music is bland and insipid too – depends a lot on how you do it. I like my folk music raw and dirty. Once it gets too shiny and over produced, I don’t want to know. Music Hall used to be an urban equivalent of folk, again there are gems amongst the piles of mawkish sentimentality. Where pop culture works, it does so by grabbing something so basically human and widely recognisable that we all engage with it. Harry Potter pushed all those buttons. That which is popular can also be good, and that which sets out to be high art can be bloody tedious.

Whether I like the precise content or not, a performer who is driven by a vision, by love of their work, by attitude, a creator who has inspiration, is someone I respect. It doesn’t matter what genre. I’ll take raw enthusiasm and passion over technical skill as well. That which is smooth and shiny, built on assumptions about how to make a commercial success, mostly makes my skin crawl. The manufactured bands, the glossy celebrity stuff where what matters is fame and attention, not the quality of what you do.

Basically what I want is arts industries that are driven by creative people, not by people in suits who are only interested in exactly how many yachts they can afford to buy this year. Yes, arts industries are businesses too, but when the only consideration is the money, and you have no place for soul, you kill the market. Music sales are down. Book sales are down. Bookshops are closing. That says something. HMV closed. What it says to me is that the model is wrong, the product is wrong. You won’t get everyone to fall in love with a creation by trying to make the exact thing that everyone will fall in love with. It doesn’t work. Risk and innovation are the lifeblood of creativity. Try to strip the risk out, and you take way the things that most engage people, and they take their hard earned money somewhere else.

Pop culture, when it works best, is by the people for the people. It comes up from the grass roots, it’s not dripped down upon us from up from above. It has roots, and the people doing it have experience, and dedication, and are not skyrocketed to success in ways that are likely to induce mental health problems. I like that kind of pop culture. I want more of it. I want fewer people in suits, in distant offices trying to imagine what I’ll cough up money for. That’s not pop culture, that’s a cynical industry that is suffocating itself to death and taking everyone else with it.

One foot on a goat

The image of ancient Druids is very much one of guardians of civilization. Law makers, historians, story tellers… advisers of Kings too. Your historical Druid was evidently right at the heart of what it meant to be civilized. Then there’s that other image, of the worshipping in Groves, cutting mistletoe off oaks and being priests of nature. Many modern Druids are drawn more to this second image, not least perhaps because humanity has got a bit carried away with the idea of being ‘civilized’ and keeps forgetting that we are nature, too.

There is an ancient Welsh story about Llew Llaw Gyfess, who can only be killed when he’s stood with one foot on a goat and the other on a well. We’ll skip over the vast amount of other story around this, or it would take over the post. I like this image though. It’s fairly improbable and impractical, which is part of the point. It also echoes riddles and challenges that crop up in other stories from all across Europe. You must come to me neither dressed nor naked, neither riding nor walking comes up all over the place. (The answer tends to be to show up in just your underwear, with your bum on a goat and your feet trailing along the ground, in case anyone was wondering…)

There’s an element of being in an inbetween place, or state here. We know the ancient Celts had a bit of a thing for the inherent magic of liminal places. Those in between states, neither one thing or another, create borderlands, from which we might touch other borderlands. It’s often the light at sunset, between day and night, that is most suggestive of faerie otherworlds. Getting in between, you might step cross into something else entirely. For anyone interested in magic, spirit or otherness, the applications are many.

But let’s come back to the goat for a moment. Stroppy, eternally hungry things that they are. Unpopular with Christians, who preferred the placid and easily led sheep. Agile, mountain climbing, independent and very good at surviving, and one of the least sensible domesticated mammals to try and stand on, at a guess. Then there’s the well, which takes us down into the earth to the source of water. The water is natural, the well is man-made. The goat is natural, but somewhat domesticated. Nature and human civilisation combine. The well stays put, the goat moves, and somehow, Llew has to stand on this. He’s not killed, even though he should be. He transforms into an eagle. The place of fatal vulnerability turns out to be not quite as advertised.

It’s a striking image.

For me, being a Druid means finding the things that are separate and having a foot in each of them. Nature and civilization are an obvious place to start. Thinking and feeling. Belief and doubt. Life and death… with one foot in each camp, the Druid connects what is separate, just by standing there. One foot on the goat, the other foot on the well. And I suppose yes, there are days when that does seem like it might be going to kill you, but somehow it doesn’t.

Beating the system

I’m watching the economic and social justice memes floating about on the social networking sites. The sheer joy of seeing the blindingly obvious being stated. You cannot run a system purely to serve those at the top, it will break and fall apart. Economics is more make believe than proper science. What we have doesn’t work. And that other one, the 100 richest people in the world could end extreme poverty four times over with what they raked in last year. I’m not going to say ‘earned’ because there is nothing that could merit that kind of wealth. People are recognising and saying that money earned does not equate to hard work, or effort, or value of what you do. It equates to the power you had in the first place. The Emperor has no clothes on.

The thought I keep coming back to, is that I do not want to contribute to the bank balances of the super rich. Watching the immoral, illogical behaviour of my own government, I’m not mad keen to give them cash either, they clearly cannot be relied upon to make good choices in how they use it. So what does that leave me? I can’t decline to pay taxes.

Or can I?

Small businesses and lone traders do not, if their turnover is very low, have to register to pay VAT. If I stay away from products with duty on them, that’s more money that isn’t going to the government. If I buy second hand, from charity shops, that’s all kinds of sticking a finger up at the system. If I buy from a creator then I know at least in the short term, my money goes to them. If I buy a small brand not a big name, use a local shop not a supermarket, and so on. Basically, if I can see the person who made the thing, or grew it, or undertook it, and I pay them, I have some idea where my money went.

If I make my own alcohol and give it away.

Giving things away is really powerful. No tax. No engagement with the money systems at all. I used to use freecycle, and when I’m not on the boat, I will again. I just gave away my poetry. I give away my time for good causes, and my ideas in the form of this blog. I can do more.

There is no way I can extricate myself entirely from a system that sends cash to people who have way too much of it already, but if all of us just made a few token gestures at non-cooperation we’d make some interesting progress.

Money appears to be what our government cares about. Protesting doesn’t bother them. Vote and you get different faces and the same shit. But hit them in the bank account, take away even a little bit of power from their economic systems, and they become vulnerable. They can’t legislate into making us give money to Rupert Murdock rather than going to a live gig. They can’t make us buy fuel rather than walking. You can’t lock people up for not buying lager, or for giving away clothes they don’t want any more, and yet the power to destabilize the whole system is there, in those small acts of rebellion.

Everyone has a book in them

There’s an idea that drives me a bit nuts. It has too much to do with the fact that most of us can read and write, and books are just a big pile of words, so of course anyone can do it. We don’t have a collective belief that we all have a fresco, symphony, ballet or opera in us. Or a really impressive bit of brain surgery just needing the right context to bring it out. This is in many ways a shame, who knows how many amazing things haven’t happened because the person who should have done it was bogged down in the idea of a book.

I cherish creativity, in all forms. I love the gorgeous photographs on facebook of things people have knitted and sewn, the craft items and artwork. Having dabbled enough in song writing to know I’m not terribly good at it, I am deeply impressed by people who can reliably get an idea down succinctly to a good tune. There are so many ways of being creative, but for some mysterious reason we’ve elevated the book as some kind of creative ideal. At the same time, from the business side, it’s one of the least lucrative things you can do. Write a song and busk with it and at the end of the day there will be some money in the hat. Not so with a book. If you have dreams of wealth and fame for writing, a novel is almost certainly not the answer. The money these days is in film, TV, and writing content for computer games. If you think that’s going to be too hard to get into, it’s not any worse than writing novels. Sure, the illusion of self publishing is that you will get a readership, but putting a book out there and getting people to read it is a whole other thing.

If you’re drawn at all to more bardic ways of working, then creating just for yourself isn’t going to be enough. The sharing of inspiration, and output is so much of what it’s all about. Making things that have nowhere to go is not a happy or rewarding process. It feels like something has aborted, and it feels wrong, and demoralising. Finding spaces to share creativity is actually a key part of the creative process. Short stories and storytelling often results in being able to get a thing into the world, where novels do not.

I’ve seen this from the outside too many times. People who wanted to write a book, and who didn’t know all the technical and business things that go with it, assuming it would be easier than the symphony or the ballet. It isn’t. Not being able to take the work forward cripples confidence and undermines inspiration, and a person who was full of creative energy can end up with very little. Frustration will do that to you.

Everyone has the capacity to create, and there are many different ways of doing it, all of them equally valid. Having been through this process with novels, I’ve ended up moving away to spend most of my time working on other things. The graphic novel are out there and doing well – there is more of a market for them, for a start. I’ve found a deep love of writing non-fiction work, which came as a total surprise to me. Far more of my creative energy goes into non-fiction work these days, and I’m determined to get back into dancing and singing. Novels are nice, and when I find a good one, I enjoy it, but they aren’t the pinnacle of creative achievement, and it’s not worth getting too focused on them. What you might have in you is the next cult TV hit, the next Ben Ten, the next pant wittingly funny piece of stand-up comedy.

If, after all of that you’re thinking, no, I really must write a novel, it is the only thing that makes sense then, yes. You may well have a novel in there trying to get out, and I wish you much joy of it.

Ancestors of Land

I talked a bit earlier this week about the relationship between Druidry and the Ancestors and Beyond the Map in terms of experiencing blood family. Ancestors of Land are also a connecting thread. We honour them in ritual, and they are whoever happened to be on the land before us. I have a keen sense of many ancestors in my current location. The canal was built, and there are ancestors of the boating life too. Go back far enough and this landscape would have been marshy. It has yielded evidence of ancient settlement. Listening to the wind in the rushes, kayaking, I have a sense of those first people who lived alongside the Severn, hunted the wild birds, and put some of their own dead in barrows on the hillsides. I’ve become conscious of how walkable the Severn vale is, and how, if there was no motorway, the journey from river to hill would be feasible.

This landscape is full of hints about ancestors. Having read Oliver Rackham’s book on the history of the British landscape, I had some ideas about things to look for, but they were broad and general. Then a thing happened. Tom and I were walking down the towpath to get to one of the places I can download email, and I saw a chap with a map in hand, looking out across the fields. There’s a footpath down towards the river, but it’s not as well signposted as would be ideal. I’ve stopped and talked to walkers many times about where the path goes. So I stopped and asked if he was looking for the aforementioned.

He wasn’t.

He had come down to look at a particularly old landscape feature indicative of former settlement, and explained to me how to read the humps and bumps in the fields. The enclosure around a settlement or farm means lower land levels on the inside as the river dumps soil round the outside. He told me how the New Grounds had been deposited by the river in mediaeval times, leading to court cases about who actually owned the land. An actual, real to goodness land historian, on my towpath, talking about my landscape. He was a tad self-effacing but after enthusing at him we managed to elicit both a name, and the critical information that he writes books. I’ve now got one of them – Gloucestershire 300 Years ago. The author is Alan Pilbeam and he’s written a few. He has an accessible writing style and an eye to the implications, so that the political and power shifts he thinks of in terms of ordinary people, too. So many of our ancestors exist as a silence in the historical record, a reasoned attempt to put some of them back in, is a wonderful thing. There’s a lot of detail about things you can go and observe, including pointers to ancient Pagan sites. It’s wonderful stuff.

To the handful of Gloucestershire Druids and for that matter non-Druids who read my stuff, I can only say hunt out this man’s work, it is brilliant. I don’t know who else is doing this other places, but if you can find any, do. There’s nothing like being able to look at the bumps in the ground and know what they mean and who was there, and why…

Rethinking my Depression

I’ve been wrestling with depression on and off for years now. It’s not a welcome addition to life, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to manage it – CBT, counselling, talking to the doctor… I’ve managed to stay away from anti-depressants. I’ve also put in time trying to understand it, working on the theory that if I grasp what causes it, I can reduce if not eliminate the problem. A significant part of what went into making me ill came from outside, a consequence of the behaviour and actions of others. I had no control over that, and attempting to step away brought me several years of hard struggle, which made things worse.

However, this stuff from outside is a contributing factor, not the whole story. I observe that depression for me is a direct consequence of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Sometimes just the one, often a combination. It’s what happens when there’s simply nothing left to push with, and I keep trying to push anyway. I think depression, for me, is a manifestation of my body saying ‘no, just not possible, we are stopping now.’ If the only way to make me stop is to put me on the floor… well, sometimes I end up on the floor. Finding I am down, I then feel useless, powerless, vulnerable, incapable and of course the inspiration dries up too. That makes me feel worse, creating an emotional pressure that keeps me down for longer.

I tend to assume that I should be able to keep going. I should be able to work and keep house/boat and be a full time parent, wife, lover, author, Druid, volunteer and do everything that needs doing. The ‘what needs doing’ is vast beyond anything I could do, there’s a whole world out there. I am a finite being who has spent a good decade refusing to recognise that simple, critical fact. I don’t have infinite supplies of energy. I cannot take an infinite amount of emotional battering. I cannot run my mind at fever pitch forever. When my body gets close to its limits, the answer is not to always try and push further. Maybe that’s worth doing sometimes, but not, I am concluding, every time. Every day.

I was very, very ill over Christmas. I think I had pneumonia. It took me several days of trying to get on as normal with a desperately ill body, increasingly struggling to breathe, before I admitted that I couldn’t cope. That’s normal for me. Often I do push through but there comes a time when if you keep trying to do that, it can really, actually kill you. It’s that whole being a finite entity thing again.

I’m going to try and rethink my depression – not as failure and shortcoming or proof of inadequacy, but as a simple, biological response to running on empty. If I feel depressed, I need to slow down and be gentle with me until I feel better, not try to keep running anyway. I’ve mostly moved away from situations where there is any external whip cracking, and the emotional pressure from outside is passably low at the moment. I can try to keep it that way, but life does what it does. If I allowed myself a bit more slack in the system to begin with, I wouldn’t be so exposed when unexpected things come in from outside. I’d have more resilience. I am going to be less tolerant of external pressures and demands, too.

Underneath this I think there’s an issue of how I value myself and how, as a consequence, I have permitted others to treat me. I had a lot of help with the under valuing, but I can step away from that and rethink. I do not have to be bound by the opinions of a vocal minority with questionable motives. I have no doubt that I will on occasion push to my limits and beyond, there are times when it’s called for and it makes sense, but it’s not a viable way of life. Other people finding me inadequate should not be the only factor here. I need to accept that if I do as much as I can sustain, that should be good enough most of the time, and if it isn’t, I’m not the only person who can shoulder responsibility. While I value myself only in terms of usefulness and achievement, I can’t actually look after myself properly. I wouldn’t ask this of anyone else, so why am I doing it to myself?